Transduction of The Laws of Logomachy: Metastability, Simondon, and the Heraclitean Lógos

This article has two overlapping aims, one specific and the other general. Specifically, it will demonstrate how the thermodynamic concept of metastability, as it distinguishes itself from thermodynamic stability and instability, may offer philosophical semantics (the philosophy of meaning, reference, and its related issues) the theoretical means with which to formulate or transduce , the laws of a novel logic or art of sense called logomachy. The general aim is, therefore, to introduce this logic of sense so that the article may then serves as a propaedeutic for further work in logomachy. Transduction, as a method of philosophising, first proposed by the French philosopher of technology Gilbert Simondon, 1 should be understood as Cécile Malaspina defines it in her An Epistemology of Noise ; that is, as a method whereby “the structuration of one field of knowledge […] transduces its guiding principles, concepts or problems, across academic divisions and institutional boundaries, into other fields of knowledge.” 2 In the case of logomachy, thermodynamics is the field of knowledge that provides guiding principles, concepts, and problems for, in this instance, logic. In many ways, the specific task of this article could be understood as an experiment in transduction since it aims to determine something previously untested by placing two fields in relation to each other. Transduction is more than analogical since it aims to produce something else, something third from this experimental encounter, rather than merely determining conceptual similarities and differences. The necessity


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The affirmation of a thermodynamic Heraclitus is, also, theoretically motivated by a secondary intention: to reconceptualise the lógos and, in doing so, detach the meaning of lógos from the meaning it has been given by the Derridean critique of logocentrism (the most dominant of the post-war continental conceptualisations of this Greek term after Martin Heidegger's).The initial turn to Heraclitus as a potential source for the development of logomachy was also equally motivated by Simondon's statement in L'Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information that metastability, though somewhat present in the Ionian school of thought, was more generally ignored or forgotten by the ancients. 3By showing how the concept of thermodynamic metastability is present in the fragments of Heraclitus, especially the kykeôn (posset) fragment (DK.22 B125), the idea is to scrutinise Simondon's train of thought concerning the Ionians-of which Heraclitus is a later representative.As Ludovic Duhem writes, "Simondon was acutely aware that Heraclitus took much of the physicalist thought of the Ionians and transduced this thought into a logic rather than an ontology." 4Heraclitus, thus, in many ways, serves as the closest example of a logic of sense that resembles logomachy, specifically as it concerns the objects of sense.

Logomachy as a Transduced Logic of Sense:
While I shall not explore in depth the etymological and conceptual history of the Greek word λογομᾰχῐᾱ nor its subsequent translations into Latin, logomachia, or English, logomachy, I shall, nonetheless, now briefly outline the two major moments in the concept's history so that what is at stake in logomachy's philosophical recovery as a logic of sense is elucidated.The first time that λογομᾰχῐᾱ is used conceptually in the Western philosophical tradition is in Plato's Cratylus.That is, while Plato does not formulate the term λογομᾰχῐᾱ (this is by the Apostle Paul, see below), he nonetheless uses the Greek words "μαχώμεθα ἐν τοῖς λόγοις" to signify something akin to λογομᾰχῐᾱ qua a conflict in and about sense.Indeed, having arrived in the Cratylus at the contradictory etymological meaning of knowledge (epistḗmē') either as "stasis" (histesi) or "movement" (hepetai) of the soul in its relation to things, Socrates opts to orient the meaning of epistḗmē' toward the contemplation of the Forms.It is also at this moment that Socrates suggests that returning to the problem, that knowledge might be anything other than stable, would result in a "μαχώμεθα ἐν τοῖς λόγοις" a conflict (makhṓmetha) in sense (lόgois), a λογομᾰχῐᾱ, logomachy.Socrates declares that logomachy is not fit for friends and henceforth must be avoided to maintain peace and prevent civil war among words.Similar to this use by Socrates, logomachy's first cited use as a compound neologism, λογομᾰχῐᾱ, is biblical and can be found in 1 Timothy, 6:4.The Apostle Paul is counselling Timothy against supporting those of his parish who spread false teachings and desire to debate the Law over simply following it.The logomachy that Paul wishes to avoid potentially threatens the Church's purity and the lógos qua the Word of God. 6 These first Greek uses of λογομᾰχῐᾱ should be kept in mind is they reveal to what extent logomachy as a Greek concept inherited into Latin, the Romance languages and then English is concerned with the movement or operations of sense and the conflicts that arise in sense due to these movements.That is, to what extent sense is stable or unstable?Beyond these Greek origins, logomachy's other major meaning is something akin to a "dispute over the meaning of words" or a sophistic "conflict waged only as a battle of words"; that is, "just semantics." Outlined most definitively by the 17 th -century Swiss theologian Samuel Werenfels in his De logomachiis eruditorum, written in Latin in 1988 then translated into English in 1702, Werenfels desires to apply a philosophical "Remedy to a most pernicious Distemper, which has long afflicted the Learned World… The contending about words (logomachy)." 7For Werenfels, there exist both good words, and bad words, both a good logos and a bad logos; the task once again, like Socrates and Paul, is to put an end to debate concerning sense.Logomachy opens up, therefore, the problem of what Lyotard might call the différend.
That is, the question of how and why disputes about sense arise as well as the practical and political implications of sense-making, sense-destroying and sense-maintaining to paraphrase Walter Benjamin from Critique of Violence.The application of logomachy so that it might investigate how sense is made, destroyed and maintained, I name logomachics. 8ving now briefly outlined what is meant by logomachy, it is also apposite to discuss what is meant by a logic of sense since the definition of logic itself could open a logomachy.I take a logic of sense to mean two things.Firstly, as it is formally understood, I take logic to mean the formal principles in accordance with which it is possible to assess the appropriateness of reasoning or judgment: why certain things can and cannot be said to make sense.In this regard, a logic is not too dissimilar to a technical grammar in so far as a technical grammar determines the constraints and limits of a language as it is used.Logomachy, as a logic or as a technical grammar of sense, likewise aims to draw-out the limits and constraints that 6 The Bible: New Revised Standard Version, eds.Zaine Ridiling (National Council of Churches, 1989), 451.
7 Samuel Werenfels, A Discourse of Logomachys: Or Controversys about Words, So Common Among Learned Men.To which is Added, a Dissertation Concerning Meteors of Stile, Or False Sublimity (Cheapside, London: J. Darby, 1711), 1.
8 Indeed, Lyotard offers many useful concepts in this regard; one would need to also look at "paralogy" as the contestation of an instituted logos.Jean-François Lyotard, Le différend, (Paris, Éditions de Minuit,   1983).
sense is bound by.These constraints could likewise then be called laws or principles since to overstep them would constitute an infringement.Secondly, then, logic is understood as the operations through which sense emerges and functions.In this regard, the notion of logic follows Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's logic as well as Gilles Deleuze's treatise on Stoic logic, how sense emerges as an expression.
Moreover, in the same way that Simondon's theory of ontogenesis, as Jean-Hugues Barthélémy writes in a note to Simondon's "The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis": "is no longer an onto-logy in the strict sense of the term," the logic of sense that I call logomachy is not a logic that understands the logos as "exterior to what it knows; nor is it "an ob-jectifying logos". 9Logomachy is closer to being a logo-genetics of sense since its logos emerges-or is generated-through the metastable system or logic that constitutes and maintains it.John Stuart Mill's famous definition from System of Logic summaries these two sides of logic.He writes: "Logic, is the science of the operations of the understanding which are subservient to the estimation of evidence: both the process itself of advancing from known truths to unknown, and all other intellectual operations in so far as they are auxiliary to this.[my emphasis]" 10 Logic is, therefore, the process or operation of the understanding in so far as it is subservient to a set of laws that govern it.These laws are not, however, arbitrary, but, as Mill writes, they are subject to the estimation of evidence.The key difference between logomachy and other logics, even Deleuze's, is that it turns to the science of thermodynamics and the notion of metastability as key to the transduction of its laws.That is, in so far as the operations of sense are subservient to evidence, this evidence is furnished by what is and what is not thermodynamically possible.In this sense, one could likewise call logomachy a critique, in the Kantian sense of the term since it is concerned with the conditions of possibility of sense and how these conditions furnish limiting laws.With Mill's definition in mind, logomachy could, therefore, be understood as inverting the usual inquiry of philosophy of technology that explores the logos of techne so as to explore the techne of the logos, with techne here understood in its widest sense as a treatise on the means through which something may come into being-what is sometimes simply understood as an art.Art, here, is, therefore, meant in the same way that Kant's third Critique is a critique of the art or power of judgment: a Kritik der Urtiels-kraft, with Kraft holding both the meaning of an art or a technical treatise as well as the power through which something comes into being.
Outlining, or transducing, the laws of logomachy might then be understood as outlining the art of sense as, indeed, the Port-Royal Logic describes itself, that is, as l'Art de Penser.
Succinctly, then, logomachy as a logic or art of sense seeks to determine 1) how sense emerges (through what systems); 2) in accordance with what laws; 3) the boundaries or limits of these laws; and 4) the 9 Jean-Hugues Barthélémy "Note 2", in Gilbert Simondon, "The Position of the Problem of Ontogenesis," trans.Gregory Flanders, Parrhesia 7, (November 2009): 14. 10 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic: Ratiocinative And Inductive (Vol. 1 of 2) (London: John Parker, 1851), practical and political implications of them.As far as (1) is concerned, logomachy is said to be a metastable system of sense that is comprised of (at least) three constitutive metastable systems of meaning or reference (Bedeutung, as it would be for Frege): a metastable system concerning the objects or referents of sense, the perception, representation and internal and external memory of these objects, and the semiotics or signification of these objects through signs or strings of signs.
Together, these metastable systems form a metastable system of systems, the synthetic metastability of which is a priori and conditions the emergence of sense. 11As indicated above, the leading question for this specific article is: Is it possible to transduce logical laws that more adequately account for how things are thermodynamically in the world?By the end of the article, I will have answered this question by thermodynamically transducing the laws of logic or thoughts-the law of identity, the law of contradiction, and the law of excluded middle-so that they accord with thermodynamics states of being such as thermal equilibrium, instability, bifurcation and metastability, thereby offering working definitions of the logical laws of logomachy.That is, I will have outlined (2) transduced the laws of logomachy through a reflection across thermodynamics, Simondon, Heraclitus and the laws of thought, with each "domain" providing guiding principles, concepts, and problems that, when thought together, will enable the formulation of the laws in accordance with which sense emerges.As far as (3) and (4) are concerned, that is, the limits of these laws and their practical and/or political application, what I have started calling logomachics, these will not be outlined in any detail in this article; however, I nonetheless hope that what is practically at stake will begin to emerge as the other points are theoretically dealt with.

Stability, Metastability, and Instability in the Natural Sciences:
Metastability, understood as an energetic system state that is in-between, meta, stability (thermal equilibrium), and instability (system bifurcation), for example, a ball stuck in a trough, sand piles and glasses, has seen increased use in contemporary philosophy primarily due to the renewed interest in the work of Simondon.It is, however, a term that finds its conceptual origins in chemistry (mostly metallurgy and mineralogy), thermodynamics, cybernetics, and other systems theories.One of the first complete theoretical discussions of metastability was formulated by Norwegian-American chemist and Nobel prize winner Lars Onsager.In 1931, the term "steady-state systems" was used by Onsager to 11 Like Frege, it is possible for sense to emerge without objective reference.For example, in literature, there are no actual references only significative references.It is also possible for sense to emerge without signification, for example, the recognition of an object of sense without a sign.describe a process akin to thermodynamic metastability.12Doron Sagan and Eric D. Schneider write that Onsager discovered that "an open system with moderately steep gradients will slow to a steady state of minimum entropy production." 13In the presence of ample available energy, an open thermodynamic system may maintain a relatively constant state without falling into a state of permanent stability, otherwise known as thermal equilibrium.In contrast, in a closed system, the entropy of the system (the dissipation of energy between two thermodynamic systems with different initial internal energies) will inevitably increase to the point that work is no longer possible.As entropy increases, both the past (exhaustion of energy differences) and the future (quantity of energy differences remaining to produce work) unfold as the system moves from the difference: T h ≠ T c toward the identity: While this overall tendency toward stable thermal equilibrium (the second law of thermodynamics) cannot be violated-the universe consists of a closed adiabatic thermodynamic system since the total quantity of internal cosmic energy remains identical (the first law of thermodynamics)-"open systems" can follow a temporal structure that allows for the local deferral of thermal equilibrium.In short, an open system means that the "metastability" of the difference between the two actual energies that produce work can be maintained, and a system can remain in a persistent state that is not the "state of least energy."Sagan and Schneider give the following example of an open metastable system: "a simple example of metastability is a Ping-Pong ball suspended in the air by a column of air blowing from a vacuum cleaner exhaust.Such a demonstration can be seen in the appliance departments of some large stores.The white ball wobbles slightly, floating on a stream of air blowing up from beneath." 14 The difference between higher energy states and "state of least energy" is likewise essential when defining what a metastable system consists of.If we take Sagan and Schneider's example, when the ping-pong ball is floating, the ball is said to have a higher energy state than when the ball falls to the ground.This higher energy state is achieved due to the relative space-time position that the ball possesses.When floating, the ball is in a relatively higher energy state than when on the ground due to the potential energy supplied by the vacuum cleaner (which gets its energy from a chain of entropic displacement that goes from the plug in the wall to the burning of fossil fuels via the spinning of a generator).What maintains this metastable state locally (the fact that the ball remains floating) is the continued energy transfer of the air from the vacuum cleaner exerted against the ball.If the vacuum cleaner were to disappear, or if the ball were pushed, it would inevitably fall to its "state of least energy", equalising the difference between the relative position of the ball in the air with the ground.For this reason, a metastable system can be described as a system that is not yet in a state of least energy since once it reaches this state of least energy, it becomes absolutely stable.
Two other scientific concepts comparable to metastability are "homeostasis", coined by American biologist Walter B. Cannon in 1932, and Nicolis and Prigogine's "dissipative structures", formulated in the 1970s. 15Its use in Simondon (from 1954 onwards), and thus the textual source of its use in contemporary philosophy, is Norbert Weiner's seminal 1948 Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine.Here, Weiner uses the concept of "metastable" and "homeostatic" to mean more or less the same system state. 16Before going on to Simondon's conceptual usage of metastability, it is important to consider these three sources since they clarify the rationale behind metastability's distinction between stability and instability in the sciences.This is done in order for this logic to later present the concepts and issues necessary for its application to philosophical semantics.
Cannon, in the introduction to The Wisdom of the Body", states that he wishes to use the term "homeostasis" to refer to biological states that remain "relatively constant" but that is also distinct from stable or "stagnant" "closed systems" at equilibrium: The constant conditions which are maintained in the body might be termed equilibria.
That word, however, has come to have fairly exact meaning as applied to relatively simple phyisco-chemical states in closed systems, where known forces are balanced.The coordinated physiological processes which maintain most of the steady states in the organism are so complex and so peculiar to living beings -involving as they may, the brain and nerves, the heart, lungs, kidneys and spleen, all working cooperatively -that I have suggested a special designation for these states, homeostasis.The word does not imply something set and immobile, a stagnation.
It means a condition -a condition which may vary but which is relatively constant. 17 , 1948), 58-59.While there is no evidence that Simondon found the term in Jean-Paul Sartre's 1943 L'être et le néant, it is worth noting that Sartre uses "metastable" to mean comparably a "precarious" psychic structure that, while still "durable," is nonetheless subject to collapse.Jean-Paul Sartre's 1943   L'être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 84.equilibrium-one where all forces were not "balanced" (i.e., not at maximum entropy)-could only be maintained by an available energy source external to the organism: "food" and "oxygen" for organic systems.Due to the biological nature of these investigations, Cannon also recognised that homeostatic systems need to be maintained "relatively constant" to guarantee the organism's survival.As Weiner argues in Cybernetics, homeostatic consistency is vital to the "healthy" functioning of the organism. 18treme fluctuations in specific processes-for example, the internal temperature of the organismwould result in the collapse of specific biological systems.
Similar to the logic at work in both Onsager's "steady-state systems" and Cannon's homeostasis, Weiner distinguishes metastability (again, the examples are biological) from stability: "We may well regard living organisms, such as Man himself, in this light.Certainly, the enzyme and the living organism are alike metastable: the stable state of an enzyme is to be deconditioned, and the stable state of a living organism is to be dead." 19Metastability is here distinguished from stability, with stability signifying the organism's death and metastability, like homeostasis, ensures the maintenance of life and the deferral of death.
Related to the maintenance of life, Weiner's use of "metastable" also concerns what he describes as the capacity for enzymes to decrease or slow down the rate of entropy (with entropy here equivalent to the movement toward stability qua death).Using Maxwell's demon as an analogy, he writes: "There is no reason to suppose that metastable demons do not exist; indeed, it may well be that enzymes are metastable Maxwell demons, decreasing entropy, perhaps not by the separation between fast and slow particles but by some other equivalent process." 20Metastability is, as such, for Weiner a condition of the continuation of the organism's sameness through time through the deferral of entropy increase.As he puts it, "catalysts and Man alike have sufficiently definite states of metastability to deserve the recognition of these states as relatively permanent conditions." 21That is, metastability is the condition of possibility of relative sameness of the system, which means that the system maintains an energetic internal difference that sustains the system as relatively permanent through time, i.e., it is not in a stable state of equilibrium, where the system collapses nor is it in an unstable state of system bifurcation.steady-state dissipative systems.Again, like homeostasis and Weiner's metastable demons, Prigogine distinguishes them from structures at equilibrium: Thermodynamic equilibrium may be characterised by the minimum of the Helmholtz free energy defined usually by: F= E-TS Are most types of "organisations" around us of this nature?It is enough to ask such a question to see that the answer is negative.Obviously, in a town, in a living system, we have a quite different type of functional order.To obtain a thermodynamic theory for this type of structure we have to show that non-equilibrium may be a source of order.Irreversible processes may lead to a new type of dynamic state of matter which I have called "dissipative structures". 22r Prigogine, therefore, "dissipative structures" are structures, both living and non-living, that are far from equilibrium (far from stability), but which irreversibly exchange energy with their environment to maintain their structure-"non-equilibrium may be a source of order".Like metastability and Onsager's steady-state systems to which Prigogine often refers, these structures are "ordered" to the extent that structures such as towns and organisms can be delimited.Still, their organisation derives from irreversible entropic processes that increase the disorder external to them-structure comes at the expense of destructuring.Or, to cite the title of Isabelle Stengers and Prigogine's book, there is order out of chaos. 23itical for Nicolis and Prigogine, these structures are subject to thermodynamic "fluctuations" that oblige them to bifurcate.As they write in their ground-breaking 1977 Self-Organisation in Nonequilibrium Systems: From Dissipative Structure to Order through Fluctuations: The purpose of bifurcation theory initiated by Poincaré and developed further by Andronov and his school, Hopf, Krasnosel'skii, and others, is to develop methods enabling one to: (a) demonstrate rigorously the existence of branching of solutions for certain critical values and (b) construct, in an approximate fashion, analytic and convergent expressions for certain 22 I. Prigogine, "Time, Structure and Fluctuations," Nobel Lecture, 8 December, 1977.23 While dissipative structures are mostly understood by Prigogine as far from equilibrium, metastability is a state property that refers to a system state that is not at equilibrium.That is, a system can be referred to as metastable both near to and far from equilibrium is a certain stability is achieved between system inputs and outputs.important types of solution emerging at the bifurcation points. 24ere are two points concerning bifurcation theory that Nicolis and Prigogine highlight, the first relates to the "existence of branching solutions", and the second relates to the "types of solution" that occur at the bifurcation points.The existence of branching solutions refers to the fact that systems whose structures are metastable are often subject to alterations or fluctuations regarding incoming values, whether those values constitute an increase or decrease in energy flows, the addition of chemical products that alter the thermodynamic properties of the system (enzymes for example), or the system's movements in spacetime (something that changes the potential energy of the system).When these values reach a critical point, the system's metastability is faced with a "problem"; the system's structure bifurcates to "solve" the alteration in the values.Following the second law of thermodynamics, the system restructures itself so that energy can continue dissipating.The clearest example of system bifurcation, also used by Simondon, is the introduction of a crystal germ into a supersaturated solution.
The saturated solution is in a metastable state, and the alteration in the system-the critical point qua problem-occurs when an external chemical product is introduced into it.The system reorganises itself through dissipation into the new crystalline form to solve this problem. 25 his Nobel prize lecture, Prigogine writes that "bifurcation introduces in a sense "history" into physics." 26Suppose the system's stability at thermal equilibrium equates to the end of this history.
Metastability then means the deferral of the system's internal movement along the arrow of time.Time's arrow is stretched.While it might appear as though the necessity of the movement from difference to identity can be interminably halted, metastability and the deferral of equilibrium always comes at the expense of exergy.Exergy is a very useful term introduced by Zoran Rant in 1956 to mean something equivalent to Gibbs free energy, energy-not-yet-dissipated, or negentropy. 27It is useful because it terminologically allows us to split energy into exergy, not-yet-dissipated and anergy already-dissipatedenergy.The metastability of any local open system pushes that which is external to it, the exergy that feeds the metastable system further along its own temporal arrow.Entropy is displaced to an external system to maintain an internal system; entropic displacement occurs via the destruction of negentropic exergy and the production of entropic anergy.Time moves not in a circle nor a line but as a conical 24 Nicolis and Prigogine, Self-Organisation in Nonequilibirum Systems, 77.
25 Though it must be mentioned that Simondon, as Stengers points out, does not discuss the dissipative nature of this "jump".Indeed, Simondon is rather quiet about entropy and dissipation in general, preferring "degradation".See Esra Atamer "Dissipative Individuation," Parrhesia 12, ( 2011

Metastability in Simondon:
As mentioned, metastability is a fundamental concept in the work of Simondon that most likely textually derives from his reading of Wiener. 28The importance of turning to Simondon before moving to Heraclitus is, as also mentioned in the introduction, Simondon explicitly questioned how a metastable logic of sense might be formulated, affirming that metastability renders the law of identity and the excluded middle null and void.Summarising many of the points about metastability from above, Cécile Malaspina writes, "Metastability is the dynamical suspension of a system between two forms of equilibrium, between entropic dispersion and structural inertia.It was Gilbert Simondon's merit to have introduced the concept of metastability to the philosophical corpus by making it the cornerstone of his theory of individuation." 29 The most concise description that Simondon gives of metastability can be found in the "Introduction" to L'Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information.Here, an ontological description is given: Individuation could not be adequately thought out and described because only one form of equilibrium was known, stable equilibrium; metastable equilibrium was not known; being was implicitly assumed to be in a state of stable equilibrium; yet stable equilibrium excludes becoming, because it corresponds to the lowest possible level of potential energy; it is the type of equilibrium that is reached in a system when all possible transformations have been achieved and no more force exists; all potentials have actualised, and the system, having reached its lowest energy level, can no longer be transformed again.The ancients only knew instability and stability, movement and rest; they did not clearly and objectively know metastability.To define metastability, it is necessary to involve the notion of the potential energy of a system, the notion of order, and that of increasing entropy; it is thus possible to define the metastable state of being, which is very different from stable equilibrium and from rest, which the Ancients could not involve in the search for the principle of individuation because no clear physical paradigm could for them enlighten its use. 30 After consulting with Jean-Hughes Barthelemy, the conclusion we came too was that Simondon's first published citations in 1954 of "métastabilité" come from Weiner and are most likely the source.See Gilbert Simondon, "Prolégomènes à une refonte de l'enseignement" in Sur la technique (1953-1983)  In this summary of metastability's conceptual history (or lack thereof), Simondon argues that the ancients only had concepts for stability and instability since no physical paradigm was offered to them that might enlighten and demand the invention of a third in-between term.In the note to this paragraph, Simondon relaxes his argument by adding that there did "exist, for the ancients, intuitive and normative equivalents" to metastability.As can be gleaned from the following unpublished summary of L'Individuation, the ancients referred to in this note by Simondon are the Ionian presocratics: This system state-unknown to the Ancients, or somewhat forgotten after having been sensed by the Ionian Physiologues in the doctrine of phusis-is that of a metastable equilibrium.
Metastability differs from stability and instability in that it is rich in potentials and cannot be thought as being completely given in an instant, simultaneous through a relation with itself. 31r Simondon, then, the conceptual difference between stability and metastability should be understood as the difference between a stable system where transformation is no longer possible because its preindividual "potentials" have been exhausted and a metastable system where (as Simondon writes in the notes to the above paragraph) "information understood as negentropy" can metastabilise the difference between actual energies, maintaining the system. 32A metastable system is, therefore, between (meta) system stability (thermal equilibrium) and instability (system bifurcation).Metastability constitutes the maintenance of being through becoming.It temporally differs from entropic collapse qua stability and system bifurcation qua instability.Discussing Simondon's example of crystallisation, the physical model that he uses to base his transductive analysis of individuation, Daniela Voss writes: "The condition for the emergence of a crystalline structure is the metastability of the system, which can be defined as the maintenance of an energy state that is different from the resting state in that it allows for processes of transformation under certain energetic conditions." 33If metastability allows for "transformation under certain energetic conditions", this is because preindividual potentials, what could be thought of as exergy, have yet to be exhausted.That is, within a metastable state, bifurcation 31 Simondon "Summary of Individuation" in Nathalie Simondon, "Some Reflections on the Life and Work of Gilbert Simondon," trans.Joe Hughes and Drew Burk, http://gilbert.simondon.fr/content/biography,accessed 10 th October 2022.32 Simondon, L'Individuation, 26.While the notion of information used by Simondon is complex and deviates from its theoretical (Information Theory) and common usage, it should be noted that, here, information functions negentropically as exergy.It is also fairly evident from the introduction to Simondon's On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects that Simondon subscribes to the idea that information may not only metastabilise local open systems but that it may offer some form of an answer to how the universal tendency toward thermal equilibrium may be avoided.As above, if one were to mount a criticism of Simondon, it would be here.
33 Daniela Voss, "Simondon on the Notion of Problem: A Genetic Schema of Individuation," Angelaki, 23, no.2 (2018): 97. from the current individualised metastable state to another metastable individualised state is still possible because the system is not yet at its lowest energy state.Preindividuality could thus be thought of as a set of possible individuations that may still be individualised, and this possibility is grounded on the no-yet-exhausted nature of the exergy inherent to the system.
One of the reasons why, as Malaspina writes, metastability is at the heart of Simondon's theory of individuation is that it offers a conception of the individual as a transformative "operation" not as an "individuated being", whether that be a substantial individual (a unity in and of itself) or a hylomorphic individual (an individual individuated through the coming together of matter and form).Metastability is an ontological concept that can conceive both the being and the becoming of the individual as partaking of the same energetic system.

Simondon, Metastability and the Laws of Thought:
Critical to the question of whether a logic of sense can be constructed from metastability, Simondon consistently, throughout his work, suggests rejecting the three laws of thought as put forward by the history of logic (the law of non-contradiction is not included but can be inferred from the other two).

For instance, Simondon writes:
A deepened thought of metastability as a condition of individuation requires the rejection of the principle of the excluded middle and the logic of identity; the complete being, which is to say, the preindividual being, is more than a unity and more than an identity, it is other than itself.
The logic of the excluded middle and of identity is a logic of stable states, able to intervene only after individuation; it does not bear on the complete being, but on an impoverished being, dephased in relation to itself, the individuated being as individual. 34mondon's reference to the laws of thought here is more than likely Aristotelian given his extensive engagement with Aristotle's metaphysics, particularly his attack on Aristotle's hylomorphism in Individuation.While it might, therefore, seem appropriate to cite Aristotle's formulations, I have instead chosen to quote Russell since his definitions are by far some of the easier to grasp in so far as Russell outlines what is at stake both logically and ontologically.Moreover, while Simondon repeats the claim that logic of the excluded middle and of identity do not hold once metastability is considered, there are no extensive citations of Aristotle to back his claims.I will, nonetheless, place Aristotle's formulations in the footnotes for ease of referencing.If metastability and thermodynamics, more widely, is to be transduced into a novel logic, it is important that what things are actually like in the world has its influence on logic that outlines the laws pertaining to what propositional claims can be said about how those things actually are in the world and he laws that govern those claims.
In his 1912 The Problems of Philosophy, Russell defines the three laws of thought in natural language.
Though related, these definitions should be distinguished from the earlier eight primitive principles, as laid out by Russell and Whitehead in Volume 1 of the 1910 Principia Mathematica, since they do not serve as a minimum set of axioms for formal logic. 35Written in natural language, these laws of thought describe the ontological "fact concerning the things in the world:" 36 (1) The law of identity: "Whatever is, is." 37 (2) The law of noncontradiction: "Nothing can both be and not be." 38(3) The law of excluded middle: "Everything must either be or not be." 39Formally or logically, the law of identity is written as a=a or x: x=x; it defines self-identity.That is, for all things that are x, x is x.This is not logically equivalent to 35 Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead, Principia Mathematica 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 1967), 91.
37 "First then this at least is obviously true, that the word "be" or "not be" has a definite meaning, so that not everything will be 'so and not so.'Again, if 'man' has one meaning, let this be 'two-footed animal'; by having one meaning I understand this:-if 'man' means 'X', then if A is a man 'X' will be what 'being a man' means for him.(It makes no difference even if one were to say a word has several meanings, if only they are limited in number; for to each definition there might be assigned a different word.For instance, we might say that 'man' has not one meaning but several, one of which would have one definition, viz.'two-footed animal,' while there might be also several other definitions if only they were limited in number; for a peculiar name might be assigned to each of the definitions.If, however, they were not limited but one were to say that the word has an infinite number of meanings, obviously reasoning would be impossible; for not to have one meaning is to have no meaning, and if words have no meaning our reasoning with one another, and indeed with ourselves, has been annihilated; for it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing; but if this is possible, one name might be assigned to this thing."Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV, Part 4 (translation by W.D. Ross).
38 "It is impossible, then, that 'being a man' should mean precisely not being a man, if 'man' not only signifies something about one subject but also has one significance [...] And it will not be possible to be and not to be the same thing, except in virtue of ambiguity, just as if one whom we call 'man,' and others were to call 'not-man'; but the point in question is not this, whether the same thing can at the same time be and not be a man in name, but whether it can be in fact."Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV, Part 4. 39 Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 41. 'But on the other hand there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate.This is clear, in the first place, if we define what the true and the false are.To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true; so that he who says of anything that it is, or that it is not, will say either what is true or what is false.'Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book IV, Part 7.
x=y since while x and y might refer to the same thing, they are not symbolically identical and cannot be reduced to x.The law of noncontradiction (LNC), formally, ~ (p.~ p), negatively forbids an identity between p and not p.Logically, this means that contradictory propositions "p is the case" and "p is not the case" cannot be concomitantly true.The law of excluded middle, formally ~p ∨ p, is a law of bivalence and can be derived from LNC. Logically, p is either true or not true.Its bivalence distinguishes it from LNC because one of two cases must be true: if p is true, then not p is not.
The philosophical problem these laws pose concerns whether there is an identity between their logical and ontological expressions (this is the same in Aristotle).For Russell, at least in the Problems of Philosophy, truthful thinking relies on the mutual accordance of the premises and the thing to these laws, rendering these laws ontologically deductive.Russell writes, "when we think in accordance with them, we think truly." 40Therefore, any proposition concerning worldly things that do not logically and ontologically conform to these laws is false.Regarding this accordance between logic and things in the world, Frege agrees.For example, in "On Sinn and Bedeutung", he concludes that "the truth value of a sentence" is concerned only with the relation to its objective "Bedeutung [referent]". 41This mutually shared position concerning the necessity of a mediated correlation between object and proposition is called, after Saul Kripke, the mediated reference theory or the "Frege-Russell view." 42Its importance for philosophical semantics is that it enables one to distinguish between, for example, proper names and propositions that refer to existing things and names and things like Ulysses, which do not refer to any existing thing but that can be spoken of with meaning.
In distinction to a theory of the laws such as George Boole's, where "the knowledge of the laws of the mind does not require as its basis any extensive collection of observations, and it is not confirmed by the repetition of instances," 43 a mediated theory of reference relies to a certain extent on epistemology.
What can be said to be true about things in the world is contingent on what is known to be true.
While this can lead to an extreme form of anti-realism or intuitionism where truth is contingent on sense perception, the insistence that logic and ontology should not be separated assists in developing a metastable logic of sense in so far as what is at stake for Simondon is the extent to which things in the world can be said to accord with the classical laws of thought as laid out above.Even though the Frege-Russell view requires material mediation, it also takes the stability of the objects of sense as a given.For example, in contrast to Frege's notion of sense and idea (Vorstellung), reference (Bedeutung) designates 40 Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 41.   41 Gottlob Frege, "On Sinn and Bedeutung,"in The Frege Reader, edited Michael Beaney ( Blackwell Publishing, 1997), 157.42 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 27 the "same thing" in the world regardless of the signs or string of signs used. 44A famous example is that of the morning and evening stars.For Frege, there is no consideration that the difference in time and space between morning and evening might affect the truth value of the Bedeutung.
For Simondon, again, most likely via as his engagement with Aristotle, these laws must be rethought since they can only be applied to things in the world that are stable individuals devoid of preindividual potential or any capacity for bifurcation.They apply, therefore, only to stable systems that are at equilibrium.That is, identity is the state of an individual that no longer has any capacity to transform and whose preindividual potentialities are exhausted.It is an individual that is identical to what it is (1) and excludes any possibility of being anything else (3), that is, being what it is not (2).An individual in such a state that conforms to the three laws of thought has reached the end of its history.That which it was ever going to be, it has become.Only at the point of its nonbeing does it concord with these laws.Paradoxically, according to these laws of thought, things in the world are thought truthfully or refer with validity only when they are no longer.If, however, an individual, according to Simondon's ontogenetics, is understood as being concurrent to its process of individuation, one must include into any complete notion of "being" preindividuality, since preindividuality pertains to the individual's possible posterior and ulterior phases as well as its participation in other transindividual realities.
Therefore, being is more than its unity, identity, and other than itself.
Simondon's rejection of the laws of thought raises the question, initially introduced in the introduction: Is it possible to formulate a logic of sense that pertains to things in the world as metastable?I argue that by returning to the work of Heraclitus, and especially his notion of lógos, such a logic of sense can be recovered and then reformulated.As Scottish Australian philosopher, John Anderson writes in his

Lectures on Greek Philosophy:
If we take logic to deal with the processes of thought or with reasoning valid and invalid on the part of persons, then we should have to admit that Heraclitus and his predecessors were not concerned with logic.But if we realise that logic has to deal with the conditions of existence and that it is only on the basis of such a theory that we can distinguish between sound and unsound reasoning, then we can see that physical objects are also logical objects and that a discussion of their characteristics may well be a logical discussion. 45 agreement with Anderson, I will demonstrate in the rest of the article that at the inception of the 44 Frege, "On Sinn and Bedeutung," 157.history of lógos, a logic pertaining to the physical objects of sense as metastable was thought.This thought will aid in the transduction of the laws of logomachy.

The Heraclitean Lógos:
The lógos's etymological relation to logic has meant that its conventional definition has come to mean something akin to valid rational thought expressed in words.Indeed, lógos is often translated as each one of these words individually: "validity", "reason", "thought", "expression", and "word."Consequently, the lógos's conceptual history has been reduced to its relation to propositional truth concerning the stability of being.Indeed, it has much to do with Jacques Derrida's notion of logocentrism that the lógos's multifaceted and complex meaning has come to be disregarded.This reduction to something like logical propositional truth can be seen at work in the exergue to Grammatology: "The history of metaphysics which, despite all the differences, and not only from Plato to Hegel (passing even through Leibniz), out of its apparent limits, from the pre-Socratics to Heidegger, has always assigned to the logos the origin of truth in general." 46rrida's definition of lógos as the "truth of truth" or "truth in general" obviates the different uses and conceptualisations of lógos that have existed throughout the history of philosophy.This preclusion of different philosophical understandings of lógos has meant that the lógos in continental thought post-Derrida, as Simon Wortham defines it, has come to mean simply "the desire for an ultimate origin, telos, centre or principle of truth which grounds meaning" and little else. 47It is by returning to the notion of lógos as it is understood by Heraclitus, a figure whom Derrida never rigorously engaged with but who was the first to conceptualise lógos, that a different notion of lógos, and from this a logic of sense, can be conceived.As I will demonstrate, Heraclitus' lógos can be understood as thermodynamic.
It points toward logomachy, a logic of sense that considers metastability.
To begin, it must be noted that Heraclitus' varying use of the word lógos makes it challenging to discern what it pertains to in the fragments beyond syntactic and semantic ambiguity.Even in fragment DK1, which is often translated as the lógos is "forever," aiei, the predicate "forever" in Ancient Greek, could quite as quickly pertain to the ignorance of those that pretend to listen to it and not the lógos itself. 48 Jacques Derrida, De la Grammatologie (Paris: Minuit, 1967), 1-12.
48 Charles H. Kahn, The art and thought Of Heraclitus: An edition of the fragments with translation and commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 29.I am using Kahn's English translation of the fragments, citing the page in the footnotes.However, as is common practice, I am including the Diels-Kranz fragment number in parentheses.Heraclitus is DK 22. and is followed by either A "Life and Doctrines," B "Fragments," or C "Imitations."(oute kruptei) but indicates (semainei)". 53And that which it indicates is conflict.
Since polemos and eris function as synonyms for lógos, the Heraclitean fragments on war (primarily DK.22 B53 and DK.22 B80) determine how the lógos unifies through conflictuality.Heraclitus writes, "One must realise [eídomai] that war is shared, and Conflict is Justice, and that all things come to pass (and are ordained?) in accordance with conflict [éris]" (DK.22 B80). 54Realising (eídomai), the same verb that Plato used for knowing the Forms (eidoi), is conditioned by conflict (éris).For Heraclitus, unity and conflictuality are concomitant.It is the conflictual relationship between separation and unification that enables a representative understanding of such opposites as death and life (DK.22B88), youth and age (DK.22 B69), night and day, war and peace, and finally, winter and summer (DK.22 B47). 55ile it might be possible to determine a Hegelian feature to this thought, Heraclitus's insistence on the primacy of conflict radically distinguishes him from such a recuperation.For Heraclitus, the lógos qua war determines the quality of the lógos itself.War is not just the reflected moment of the movement of the Concept toward absolute knowledge.To grasp the lógos, one must grasp the fundamental conflictuality of nature.As Nietzsche writes, "the one overall Becoming is itself law; that it becomes and how it becomes is its work." 56This "how" of the "law" of the lógos is the conflictual work that the lógoi perform so that sense may appear.The Heraclitean lógos is, thus, comparable to the Saussurian claim that "in languages, there are only differences without positive terms." 57In the lógos of Heraclitus, there are no determinate terms before the conflictual difference that constitute them.Only if Saussure's "structuralism" presents language as a static time-slice, then Heraclitus's flows.Indeed, if the war of opposites is to be taken to mean precisely that-war-then this conflictuality must be understood as subject to the energetic laws of exhaustion and resistance.

Quamity or Howness: The Lógos as Thermodynamic System State:
For Clémence Ramnoux, as it is for certain other classics scholars such as Theodoros Christidis, Heraclitean fire (pyr), that which is synonymous to the operations of the lógos, is understood as being 53 Maurice Blanchot, "Préface", in Ramnoux, l'homme entre les choses et les mots, xix.), 67 the fragment is concerned with how motion is the condition, in a seemingly contradictory manner, of the unity of the drink.That is, as N. van der Ben writes, translating kykeôn as posset: "'the posset stops when it moves': when the circular motion has taken full hold of it, the posset 'stops' changing in any further way, having arrived at its final state qua posset." 68Negatively, without movement, the kykeôn could not be what it is.That is, the state in which it is said to be the compound kykeôn and not the separate parts barley, cheese, and wine emerges from how it is stirred.Thermodynamically, to metastabilise the kykeôn, which means to stop the drink from separating so that it remains in a phasic metastable liquid thermodynamic system state, one needs consistently to supply free energy to the system by stirring it.Without the action of agitation, the drink would no longer constitute unity.The movement or energetic work of agitation permits the unity of the drink to endure.The kykeôn rests by changing; its being is maintained through becoming.The kykeôn hence functions as an example of how objects in the world are metastable and how a logic of sense that allows for judgement can be transduced therefrom.This is to say, the capacity to judge the kykeôn as an object of sense-to be able to think, say or write something akin to "that is kykeôn" with validity-the quamity of the kykeôn has to be such that its system state is in a metastable state of sameness.Objective judgements pertaining to objects of sense are possible only when they remain the same as themselves.This logic of metastable sameness is also at work in the well-known Heraclitean fragments concerning the river (DK.22 B12 and DK.22 B91).As Cleanthes, the 3 rd Century Greek Stoic quotes Heraclitus as saying: "As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters [hetera kai hetera hydata] flow upon them" (DK.22 B12). 69The metastable "sameness" (autoisin) of the river as an object of sense remains the same by being continually replenished with different waters (hetera hydata).As they flow into the river, the waters push against the banks, and the banks hold the water in.This mutual modulation between the water and the bank constitutes the form of the river.Simondon would write that this modulation is the process of individuation from whence the individual emerges a presentae.There is, therefore, a play between "autos" and "hetera", "sameness", and "difference."The river, like the kykeôn, rests (it remains the same river) by changing waters.The work of the source's flow in conjunction with the banks of the river, like the stirring of the kykeôn, maintains the metastability of the river's sameness.Suppose the river's source were to stop flowing or the banks were to give in under the pressure of an increase in flow; the metastability of the river would enter a state of instability and bifurcate.A different, new river might even be formed.The waters that feed the river must, therefore, remain minimally different from each other so that the quamity of the river, its system state, remains the same.As with the case of the 67 Kahn, Heraclitus, 65.   68 N. van der Ben, "Theophrastus, De Vertigine, Ch. 9, and Heraclitus Fr. 125," The American Journal of Philology 109, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988): 401.formation of a new river, maximal differences are, therefore, the condition of bifurcation.
The notion of sameness used here must be distinct from identity. 70Identity refers to a metaphysical claim that contains no "degree" of difference and can only be logically "true" outside of space and time. 71Unlike the Frege-Russell view cited above, I claim that it would be wrong to refer to a thing in the world as identical to itself, it is possible to refer to a thing in the world as being the same.Sameness is, therefore, contingent not on any logical or ontological identity but on minimal internal energetic differences such that the quamity (how it is) of the object of sense remains metastable.The morning star is not identical to the evening star, they are not referentially identical; but Venus's quamity has remained in a minimally different state for thousands of years.Its orbit has not maximally deviated, nor has its volume or surface temperature.The morning star and the evening star are thus the same.
Sameness contains differing amounts of difference.While this may appear similar to Deleuze's claims in Différence et répétition, the difference between identity and sameness and the thermodynamic logic behind it complicates Deleuze's argument that "the Same" (le Meme) is a quality of identity. 72Identity can have no corresponding concepts since anything that deviates from it as identical admits difference, this is an old problem, one that is discussed at length in Plato's Parmenides.As with the case of the river, it continually flows with "different" waters and thus cannot be understood as identical to itself.
Yet it may still be understood as the "same".Heraclitus' choice of the dative aûtoisin over homóisin reflects the difference between identity and sameness since homós relates to ousía, containing within it no "otherness" or difference.By contrast, the aû in autos, meaning "back again" but also "other," describes the metastability of sameness through the "recursive" maintenance of minimal differences, as Yuk Hui might write. 73However, because the quamity of a system state depends on the supply of free energy into the system and because the supply of free energy is entropically finite, no system can recursively maintain its sameness infinitely.Therefore, the inevitable collapse of any system is an inherent property of metastable sameness itself.
The lógos must not, therefore, be understood in terms of substantiality or as "the self-presence of full self-consciousness" or even the "truth of truth," as Derrida argues.The lógos emerges as a system state contingent on the degree of energetic difference inherent to the object of sense.Because all system 70 This is far from being the case for all philosophers.See: Harold Noonan and Ben Curtis, 'Identity', The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/identity/>.'"Identity" and "sameness" mean the same; their meanings are identical.'71 Walter Benjamin points this out in a fragment from 1916, "Theses on the Problem of Identity" in   Selected Writings Vol.1: 1913-1926, eds.Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (London: Harvard University Press, 2004), 76. 72 Giles Deleuze, "L'image de la pensée," in Différence et répétition (Paris: PUF, 2015), 174.states are entropically finite, logoi are likewise finite.

Conclusion: The Three Laws of Logomachy:
Above, the question was asked: Is it possible to formulate a logic of sense that pertains to things in the world as metastable?By investigating the logical and temporal structure of metastability in conjunction with Simondon's rejection of the three laws of thought and Heraclitus's lógos as it pertains to the metastability of objects and the emergence of sense as a system state, an answer to this question has been transduced in the form of the three laws of logomachy: (1) The law of metastable sameness: "However something is, is because its sameness (being) is metastable." (2) The law of metastable contradiction: "metastability maintains sameness while concomitantly conditioning the possibility of bifurcation (becoming) and the necessity of collapse (nonbeing)." (3) The law of minimal and maximal difference: "Nothing is identical to itself; there are only minimal (sameness) and maximal energetic differences (difference)." These laws are logical in that they facilitate valid judgment and are ontological in that they express how things are in the world.For example, if one were to make the judgment (what Kant would call a determinate and empirical judgment) "that something is something" (propositional logic), the validity of that judgment, in so far as a proposition can be made about something in the world, is dependent on that object being in a metastable state of sameness.In other words, in the propositional statement, "That is a table", the table cannot be on fire, it cannot be reduced to ash, nor can it be chopped up and used to make a chair since all of these changes would constitute maximal differences: "That is a table" would no longer be valid.Furthermore, it is inevitable that through wear and tear, a table's sameness is likely to alter (it no longer has a functioning draw, for example) and that maintenance becomes necessary.However, maintenance understood here as replacing a part with another part (the draw), gives way to metastable contradiction.In other words, the table is bifurcated by being maintained as the same.Therefore, one might say, "This is no longer the same table."Lastly, there will be a time when the table can no longer be maintained, or it's not chosen to be repaired, and the acceleration of collapse will take hold.Here the proposition becomes its negation: That is not a table" or "There is no table."Written in natural language, these laws may now function as the guiding principles for further

5 3
Gilbert Simondon, L'Individuation à la lumière des notions de forme et d'information (Grenoble: Millon, 2013), 26. 4 Ludovic Duhem, "Apeiron et physis ; Simondon transducteur des présocratiques", Cahiers Simondon no. 4 (2012).5 Cra.430 c-d.Joel White 4 Though unfamiliar with Onsager's work on steady-state systems, Cannon uses conceptual terminology similar to Onsager.Homeostasis is a coordinated system of open biological processes that maintain an organism in a "steady state" that is not at equilibrium.Cannon documented that such a state of non-15 Walter B Cannon, The Wisdom of the Body (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1932); G. Nicolis and I. Prigogine, Self-Organisation in Nonequilibirum Systems: From Dissipative Structure to Order through Fluctuations (New York: Wiley, 1977).16 Norbert Weiner, Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Cambridge: The M.I.T Press Considering stability, metastability and system bifurcation, G. Nicolis and Prigogine accomplished the conceptual and mathematical generalisation of open thermodynamic systems in the late 1970s.During his 1977 Nobel Prize lecture, Prigogine describes "dissipative structures," his analogical concept for 18Weiner, Cybernetics, 114.19 Weiner, Cybernetics, 58.20 Weiner, Cybernetics, 58-59. ): 57-70.26 Prigogine, "Time, Structure and Fluctuations".27 Zoran Rant, "Exergie, Ein neues Wort für 'technische Arbeitsfähigkeit,'" Forschung Auf dem Gebiete des Ingenieurwesens 22, (1956): 36-37.Joel White 12 spiral, each turn constituting the exhaustion of the exergy necessary for the line to continue along its vector.Upward local spirals always come at the expense of a larger general downward spiral.